Microsoft's IE8 "Get the Facts" campaign backfires

Posted on 29th June 2009 at 1:45 pm by Ian Macfarlane

Microsoft has launched a new "Get the Facts" campaign, this time promoting Microsoft Internet Explorer. The marketing teams may have been a little *too* enthusiastic - the campaign has gone viral for all the wrong reasons.

Microsoft has launched a marketing campaign to promote the latest incarnation of its web browser, Internet Explorer 8 (IE8). The campaign is branded “Get the Facts”, a tagline which Microsoft previously used for a marketing campaign to try and demonstrate that Windows Server was a cheaper server platform than Linux.

This new campaign compares IE8 with competitor browsers Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome (although notably not with Apple’s Safari browser, which currently has many more users than Chrome does, or Opera, which has been around for a long time and is a major player in some markets).

The part which has attracted the most attention is this comparison page, which attempts to provide a point by point comparison against the other two browsers using check marks. Whilst the use of check marks for comparison is not necessarily bad – they provide a very accessible visual method of comparing features of multiple products - when you move beyond concrete features to more nebulous concepts such as usability, check marks may no longer be capable of presenting claims in an objective manner.

Dissecting the claims

Let’s look through some of the claims - or more precisely, how they are presented. Here are the first three rows in the table, covering the issues of security, privacy and "ease of use" respectively.

This chart suggests that the other browsers are insecure and hard to use.

The use of check marks here seems to imply that Internet Explorer 8 “has” all of these three things, whilst the other two browsers simply “do not”. The oversimplification of using check marks to “prove” the superiority of a product on such broad, multifaceted categories as these is almost inviting ridicule (regardless of the company producing it).

In a similar vein, further down the list is the issue of “reliability” - again, according to the check marks, IE8 has “got it” and its competitors don’t. Here Microsoft has reduced the complex concept of "reliability" to two features which it has – like the first three bullet points, this is a broad oversimplification.

U-turns

Let’s have a look now at some of the areas where the other browsers were given check marks by Microsoft.

For web standards, the initial version of this page declared “a tie” – stating:

It's a tie. Internet Explorer 8 passes more of the World Wide Web Consortium's CSS 2.1 test cases than any other browser, but Firefox 3 has more support for some evolving standards.

However, Microsoft failed to mention that it wrote many of these test cases. Unfortunately for Microsoft, on the Internet little details like this rarely get missed, and apparent conflicts of interest quickly turn into conspiracy theories and help fan the fires of bad press yet further. You might remember I said “initial version” – today, it now reads:

Firefox and Chrome have more support for emerging standards like HTML5 and CSS3, but Internet Explorer 8 invested heavily in having world-class, consistent support for the entire CSS2.1 specification.

Now that’s decidedly less positive than the earlier statement, isn’t it?

Another marketing U-turn happened in the "developer tools" category. Initially, Microsoft claimed a win here as IE8 comes with a number of such tools built-in, rather than having to download them separately. Again, the marketing piece disingenuously focuses on something which is technically correct whilst ignoring the wider picture. In addition to re-writing this comment as well, the change here was particularly glaring - Microsoft added another big green tick beside one of the other browsers.

There were further examples of somewhat dubious claims in the piece, but you get the general idea. From an Internet marketing perspective, what we're really interested in is what happened after Microsoft published this marketing campaign on the web.

What happened next

So a high profile company runs a major marketing campaign filled with dubious claims - in a virally-friendly, accessible infographic format to boot. I'm sure you don't need me to tell you what happened next.

Yes, unsurprisingly, people read it, laughed, and then sent it to their friends. And their friends sent it to their friends. And that, of course, is how things go viral. It went massively viral in an incredibly short space of time, hitting the homepage of Digg in no time at all. The Digg summary cheekily sums the entire article up with the comment “it's amazing what you can conclude with checkmarks”. It didn’t stop there – two different satirical versions of the checklist and yet another critical article about it also made it to Digg's homepage over the following two days. Imagine having four items on the Digg homepage which are critical of your new marketing campaign, in the space of a few days? Ouch!

The mainstream technical press weren't kind either - the headline on ZDNet is "Microsoft's IE8 "Get the facts" campaign - heavy on propaganda, light on facts", PCPro took the effort to give an in-depth point-by-point rebuttal of the claims, and PCWorld's article, titled "IE8's "Get the Facts Marketing Gets It Wrong", starts with the summary "If Microsoft wants us to take IE8 seriously, the company should treat our intelligence with some respect."

What does this mean? Honestly, I don't think that the people who wrote this have a firm grasp on the brave new world of online PR. This piece was never going be taken at face value, and the events following its publication were completely foreseeable. It’s been a complete PR disaster for Microsoft. I mean really - what were they thinking?

Unless Microsoft’s PR team really are geniuses and already expected this to happen. All publicity is supposed to be good publicity, right?

Before I finish, I feel I must add an important note - Internet Explorer 8 is a massive leap in both web standards support and performance from its predecessor, Internet Explorer 7, and Microsoft should be commended for developing it. However, this marketing campaign was, quite simply, never going to be anything short of disastrous. The lesson is quite simple - in the age of the Internet, dodgy statements and half-truths will be picked apart and, if the target is high-profile enough, will spread like wildfire. Just ask your MP.

File under: marketing microsoft fail browsers

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